Project Management

Keys to Chartering an Agile Project

Mass Bay Chapter

Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.

When you’re a project manager for a traditional project, it’s easy to write a project charter. You can sit in your office and write it alone, if necessary. You don’t have to involve the team. On an agile project, is that the right thing to do? Should you even use the same template?

Agile projects are collaborative. You might not have an agile project manager for your team. You might have a ScrumMaster or a coach, neither of whom is a project manager. You might not have anyone who fills exactly the same role the project manager used to fill. But you still need a charter--it helps the team see the vision and the release criteria, among other potential other valuable information. How do you charter an agile project?

Do you know where you’re headed?
The first question I ask teams is this: Do you know where this project is headed? I don’t want to know about this iteration. The team might have an iteration goal. I want to know if they have a vision for the entire project.

If you are transitioning to agile, you might have a project that has to fix some technical debt and a number of defects. Do you want to call that vision “Fix the debt project”? I don’t think so. It’s true, but it doesn’t “wow” anyone. It doesn’t explain why you are doing the project and why anyone should care about doing …


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